A report from the documentation maintainer

Posted Oct 27, 2016 14:10 UTC (Thu) by niner (guest, #26151)
In reply to: A report from the documentation maintainer by xtifr
Parent article: A report from the documentation maintainer

There are more than 2300 pointers at Documentation files in the kernel source in comments. None of them could have used auto completion or point and click.

to post comments

Documentation/ references

Posted Oct 27, 2016 14:15 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (8 responses)

Heh...that's a bit of a disincentive to moving Documentation/, of course...:)

Even more common, though, is references in email. People type those every day, and I've already gotten complaints about making the path to files longer than it is already.

Documentation/ references

Posted Oct 28, 2016 20:30 UTC (Fri) by HIGHGuY (subscriber, #62277) [Link] (7 responses)

git supports soft-links, so it should be easy to let docs -> Documentation, followed by a period of clean-ups in the code and ultimately moving Documentation over docs or swapping things around with Documentation -> docs. The latter might accomodate weblinks pointing to kernel.org git repo's and similar things.

Is there some peculiar reason why that wouldn't be allowed? (checkout on FAT or NTFS filesystems perhaps >:-] )

Documentation/ references

Posted Oct 29, 2016 0:12 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

How do you propose fixing all the other links that point to kernel trees hosted somewhere other than kernel.org? Or do those just stay broken forever?

Documentation/ references

Posted Oct 31, 2016 13:19 UTC (Mon) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link] (5 responses)

> (checkout on FAT or NTFS filesystems perhaps >:-] )

Checkout on FAT or NTFS is already not possible, since the kernel has files which differ only on case.

Documentation/ references

Posted Oct 31, 2016 15:39 UTC (Mon) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (4 responses)

NTFS is case-sensitive, so there isn't a problem.

Documentation/ references

Posted Oct 31, 2016 16:21 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

Not true. NTFS is case-preserving but not case-sensitive. You _can_ create files on NTFS that differ only in case, but it will cause a lot of problems (like not being able to delete them using regular tools).

Documentation/ references

Posted Nov 7, 2016 4:10 UTC (Mon) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link] (2 responses)

NTFS is case sensitive.

The NT kernel supports case sensitive file systems.

The Windows subsystems & applications using it have problems with it.

Documentation/ references

Posted Nov 7, 2016 4:44 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

NTFS stores case mapping in a metafile called "$UpCase". You are free to ignore it and write files named "Foo" and "FOO" but this will break the Windows API.

Documentation/ references

Posted Nov 7, 2016 12:16 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

It is fun to use a Samba share from Linux and create files Windows has problems with and explore that way. Creating a file named CON gets mangled in Explorer to some string X. Create a file named X and Explorer cannot delete the CON file until the other disappears (selecting the right file does not work; deletion is by name). Similar shenanigans happen with mixed cases.